Unexplained Mysteries
Nick, Peter, Chris and Fraser discuss the point at which mysteries become unexplained and when should you stop looking for something lost.
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the search for flight MH370. Nick, can you lead us in on this?
Speaker B:Yeah, well they recently called off the search for MH370, at least in the area where they were fairly sure it was going to be. So just, I mean, everyone must be aware of this, but just to explain, this is the aeroplane which I think a couple of years ago disappeared under absolutely baffling circumstances and, you know, started quite quickly going the wrong way, then sort of appeared to change course a few times and ended up, they think, based on, you know, indirect inference, they think ended up somewhere in the Indian Ocean and it was only meant to be a short trip. So yeah, anyway, it was, you know, absolutely baffling. No one knows, obviously, they can't find the black box recorder so they don't know what was happening on the plane. The records of where it was were based on kind of inference from satellite navigation pings. It's, you know, and so there was a huge amount of interest, not quite, and I think quite apart from wanting to understand it so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again. I think people are, you know, interested in it because we desperately want an explanation for it and that's, I think, what we want to talk about really is what is it about unexplained mysteries? What makes them particularly compelling and what do we mean by an unexplained mystery? Okay, so should we start
Speaker A:off by trying to answer that question that Nick has just posed? Peter or Chris, does one of you
Speaker C:want to go for that? Yeah, so I think there's probably formal and semi-formal definitions of when things become inexplicable. I'm sure that the police have criteria by which point they downscale the amount of resources given over to a particular investigation, presumably at some point where all possible avenues have been explored and no new information is arriving and so they can't progress the investigation any further and it becomes a cold case and then turns up on new tricks in 20 years time. So it probably has some indirect, albeit not formal, definition relating to the rate at which new information is found or the expected cost
Speaker A:of gaining new information. Yes and also the value of what it, maybe you said this,
Speaker C:maybe the value of what it is we're after? Yeah and presumably the value issue, although that won't be any consolation to the families of the victims in a crime or air crash, but at some point it becomes just too expensive to continue and I think the figures for the cost of the search for MH370 run into the hundreds of millions of Australian dollars in the search for that air
Speaker D:file. I mean what I think is interesting is how the strength of our curiosity about this kind of mystery isn't necessarily governed by the value of finding out the answer and to illustrate this I'm going to tell you about the story, well I won't tell you about the title of the story, but I live down in Bournemouth by the sea and I was walking along the beach one day and I saw something strange sort of bobbing up and down in the shallows and I thought I'd better go and see what, you know, it just kind of piqued my interest. I went over to see what it was and as I rescued this item I realised it was a coconut and I started to think about how this coconut might have made it onto the beach. I was like, so has this dropped off of a tropical island somewhere and washed all the way to my shore? Was it, you know, a shipwreck sort of transporting a giant cargo of coconuts somewhere? Was it somebody around the corner at a local coconut shy or something, you know, who won a coconut and didn't know what to do with it so they threw it in the sea? But I couldn't really explain why I was so interested in this but I sort of kind of became a bit fascinated by where the coconut had come from, so much so that it now sort of stands pride of place in my house. Well wait a minute, where did the coconut come from? Well I don't
Speaker B:know, it's an unexplained mystery. Now, so this is actually quite closely related to my theory of what makes an unexplained mystery. That's only, I think, slightly unexplained. A world is full of unexplained mysteries. I don't know, there's a bush in my front garden, I don't know who planted it, right? Why is that not an interesting? Right, so and I think this points to my theory about what makes something an unexplained mystery is that every hypothesis we can come up with puts a very low probability on the thing having happened. So in the case of MH370, all of the explanations people have advanced have at least one piece of the jigsaw puzzle which isn't consistent with it. You know, no explanation seems to fit the data and I think that's where we really sort of keep thinking and thinking and thinking because we think that out there, there's a hypothesis that explains it. Now in the case of the coconut, it actually, you know, it's superficially, you know, quite unusual and most of the explanations actually are going to be implausible but one of them is probably going to be true. Probably a guy had a coconut and he threw it away onto the beach. It's probably something like that. But why did he throw the coconut away? Right, but it doesn't happen very often, right? So, I mean, people don't often throw coconuts onto beaches but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. So, I mean, it strikes me that in that instance, it's a bit of a puzzle. It reminds me, actually, I had a, and often, you know, often, I think part of where this sort of is an intellectual exercise, where it becomes the hard bit of this is thinking of the hypothesis, thinking of the explanation. It's, you know, it's not like we've got 20 explanations and we're not sure which is right. If we had 20, you know, one of them is probably true. That's fine. It's where there's something where we cannot think of a hypothesis which seems to fit those facts. I remember what, it's interesting, you mentioned beaches. I remember walking along the beach in Norfolk one day and I saw a load of bubbles, apparently coming out of the sand, like shiny bubbles, almost like suds but they were just sort of bubbles and I thought this is some strange beach phenomenon that I've never seen before, like bubbles appearing out of the sand and then I looked down and looked around and there was a little girl blowing bubbles out of a bubble thing and they were landing on the sand and that was, you know, mystery solved. But actually, my brain didn't go there first and I had a similar thing a couple of months ago where my TV remote suddenly stopped working and I did all the usual stuff, took the batteries out, rolled them around a bit and, you know, and then I discovered that the remote to my preview box wasn't working either and then it really became, I was like, well, there must be some kind of interference coming from outside. Someone must be jamming my remote controls. It seems it's impossible to imagine that they've both broken at the same time and, you know, I was tearing my hair out. I was checking online, turned out that there was a plate leaning on my DVD remote and that was just getting in the way of the other signals. But I think, you know, life is, I mean, thank goodness I found that out. I could have gone to my grave having gone literally insane trying to work out what happened. And refusing to wash up the plate. Yeah, exactly. But, I mean, so I think that's the key here is sort of when we can't think of an explanation which seems to fit those facts. If we can think of an explanation, even if we're not sure if it's the right one, you know, we're kind of okay with it but it's where we cannot think of an explanation which seems to explain what's going on.
Speaker A:Look, I think you're all quite geeky and I've got a different explanation for this but I will come to my explanation in a moment. Peter.
Speaker C:I just want to challenge your theories to why they're interesting, Nick, because maybe you've not, maybe you don't ponder the origins of the bush in your front garden because it's not very exciting. There are lots of bushes you can't explain all over the place, whereas the coconut and the loss of an aircraft are unusual events.
Speaker B:No, no, the coconut isn't in itself remotely exciting. It's no more exciting than where my bush came from, but it's just, it's just less probable. It's not.
Speaker C:It's more unusual, which makes it less, you know, there are bushes everywhere.
Speaker B:Yes, exactly. It's a lower, it features as having a lower probability in any theory you can come up with. But I'm just saying it's not of any more import. It's not like it's more important somehow. Well, it's more intriguing. Yeah, well, only, but yeah, well, that's, I think that's pretty much what I said is that, you know, it's intriguing because it's less probable under any, under any theory, but I'm just saying it's, you know, it's not about the, something being unknown. It's about it being unexplained, you know. Maybe, I don't know.
Speaker D:So, I mean, because if you think about great unexplained mysteries, historically, you know, something like the identity of Jack the Ripper, there are plenty of plausible hypotheses out there. And yet people still keep coming back to this, this question, there's something nagging, unfulfilled about it. What, what is it? What is it that makes a mystery compelling like, like that?
Speaker A:Well, I think the answer is, I think it's, it's about story. And as humans is the, I don't know why, but innately, we have this desire or this affinity with story. Okay. And, and one of the things that happens is with stories is that they end and there's a narrative arc, they have a beginning, a middle and an end. And so if we have a story where there is no end, effectively, or where there is no beginning, as in the case of your coconut, we don't know what the beginning was, we know what the end was, is there's this sense of incompletion that agitates our minds. Now, I can't, you know, begin to wonder what the physiological reasons are for this, but I do know, I do feel that as humans, we like stories. And that's what I think it's about.
Speaker C:I would posit that that's, that is the kind of effect that makes it intriguing, because if there's an unusual circumstance that presents to you an unusual set of stimuli, your brain has evolved to see that as an opportunity for gathering information, which will improve how you then interact with the world later on. So maybe it's to do with this unusual story, a story that you've never heard before being compelling, because it will teach you something that you've not heard
Speaker B:before. Yeah, not mundane. Yeah, but it doesn't, it's not enough. Because I mean, we can, it's not enough. Okay, it's not enough to say that it's, it's not enough to say that it's improbable in itself. Because if it's improbable, but we've got a good explanation for it, then I think we're fine, we're happy. It's, you know, and it's not the lack of an explanation, because lots of things that, you know, where there are 20 perfectly reasonable explanations, say Jack the Ripper, for example, loads of unsolved murders in Victorian London, no one cares about them. The interesting thing about Jack the Ripper is that actually the evidence is sort of, if we could say, yes, this was just some, you know, East End scumbag, then that'd be fine. But it's, but it's not, it's kind of the fact that they appeared to have quite esoteric medical knowledge to be able to dissect their victims. The fact that on one night, they appeared to travel, you know, several miles from one place to another, consistent possibly with, you know, owning a carriage and that or at least having use of a carriage. And, you know, actually, there isn't a sort of, you know, and if it was someone well educated, but what was their motive? And, you know, they actually just, I think it is to do with the character of the evidence. It's not just the story, which makes it compelling. And I think if we found the answer to Jack Ripper, we would, we would just cease to be interested in the story. It's so I mean, unexplained mystery, I was quite interested in big by a few years ago, which has now been solved was the, the, the sailing stones of the, of the racetrack plier in Death Valley. So there were these stones that were in one place. And next time people came back, they'd move this is a sandy desert or big stones. They were in, they were in one place in the desert. And then they'd moved and to make matters worse, they even had a track, a trail showing where they'd moved. Nobody ever saw them in the act. And this was one of these great, you know, was it aliens type things? Was it huge? Are they huge boulders? Okay. You couldn't just go in and sort of push them along. Turns out it's, it's some particular that, you know, when, when it's wet and, and then cold, it forms these kind of ice, an ice layer and they skid along on the ice layer because of the wind. Yeah. The wind blows them along very, very gently on this ice layer. I actually think it's a less interesting world. Now I know that. Yeah. I find it. Yeah. I find that quite, quite boring. I mean, it's, you know, it's great that we've found out, but it's, you know, it's no longer something that particularly interests me. Okay. So where are we going on
Speaker A:this? So does anyone want to chip in anything at this point? Well, I think from a, from an
Speaker D:analytical point of view, it shows that we, our natural curiosity in something is not necessarily determined by a rational assessment of its value. And maybe there is a disconnect organizationally. If you just follow things that are interesting, you may not necessarily be looking at the optimal things. So perhaps there's a, perhaps there's a role to sort of think about almost trying to, trying to quell curiosity or use curiosity in the right way to achieve sort of analytical goals, you know, finding out the right information as opposed to random things about celebrities or crop circles. I think, I think there's something that there's
Speaker C:a in business and in government, there's a big drive to improve innovation. And it's seen as a separate thing that's different and separate from the normal day-to-day business of running the, running the show. And maybe that's sort of a natural reaction to prevent, if you said, right, everyone just innovate and we'll let you crack on. Then you forget about doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing and having loads of great ideas, but not concentrate on making the money that will pay for having the good ideas. So maybe, maybe, maybe, and maybe businesses are struggling to find that balance at the moment that, because innovation will happen in the job, won't be a separate function. It'll be somebody who says, I think I've got a better way of doing this. This might be a new product. This might be a new service. I think they're very, they're
Speaker B:actually, I'd say very closely related in the sense that forming or identifying a new hypothesis to explain something is sort of, is a classic example of creative thinking. You know, it's sort of, it's something that isn't explained by all the theories we have so far. And likewise, when you, when you think about some process or some way of doing something and you want to come up with a better way of doing it, often, you know, the really innovative things will be something which is unlike anything that's happened before. So coming up with a good explanation for something is very similar to coming up with a new technology for doing something in terms of the thought processes. And, and I think that, you know, obviously one of those things that we want to encourage is creative thinking, but, but yeah, I mean, it's not, it's, it's kind of useful for those
Speaker A:sorts of things. Nice. Nice. I like that. We're actually, time's flown by. We're quite close to wrapping up. Unexplained mysteries. Any, I mean, we've had Chris's example of the coconut that appeared in his life, which remains in his life as part of his growing coconut shrine. Anyone else, any big explained mysteries in your life? I like, Chris looks like he's got another
Speaker B:one, but we'll come to it in a moment. Well, I've got a glitch, glitch in the matrix, as it's known on Reddit, is when I was about eight, I was in the playground with, with, you know, a bunch of other lads and we, and a chap, chap called Peter Thewlis was swinging a cricket bat around, you know, just waving it around. We were standing nearby and I very distinctly saw this cricket bat extend to about 10 feet in length and swing about an inch from my nose. And I would have thought, trick of the light, very weird, but my friend Tim, who was standing next to me, turned to me and said, was it me or did that cricket bat just, just get really, really long and swing past our noses? And I cannot, I mean, I just, I have no idea what freak phenomenon occurred, what strange illusion happened to strike, but it's, that's always stuck in my mind as one of those things, which I can't, I just, you know, I know that there's nothing I'll ever be able to do to find out what the hell
Speaker C:happened. I can't think of any example, but a sort of mantra that I live by is that I try to eliminate all magic from my world by trying to explain things by being a permanent cynic. So as soon as I find something even remotely odd, I'll research the hell out of it and find out what it, what caused this or, or what, what, what actually happened. But so I can't think of any examples
Speaker A:I've not been able to satisfy. That's what I was going to ask, and every time you've, you've been able to satisfy it. Yeah. Good. Okay. Yeah. Chris, you look like you've got another one there.
Speaker D:No, I'm, I'm still perplexed by the, the, the coconut. He's obsessed. It remains,
Speaker B:it remains. It could make the world's most mundane Sherlock Holmes story. The mystery,
Speaker A:the mystery of the dropped coconut. But you should write a series of stories based on, on it. Each with a plausible hypothesis. Yeah, no, that'd be good. I've got one, but it's, it's not exactly an unexplained mystery, but it was just a, just a freak coincidence or something. It was so improbable that it's something that was so improbable. I doubt that it happened, but actually I know it did happen, which was when I was about 15, I was a bit of an insomniac and, and I used to like being an insomniac because I used to sit around sort of just imagining all sorts of things really. And, and out of that age, I hadn't traveled much, but I, I was really interested in traveling and I was very motivated to do so. And indeed later on in my life, I did go on to travel a reasonable amount. Anyway, with this one evening, this one night in my bed, I had my Atlas and I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll flick through my Atlas, close my eyes, flick through and put my finger down and I'll do that 10 times. And wherever it lands, those are the, I'll write them down. And these are the places that I will visit in my life, which I thought was quite an interesting exercise. So I did this and put my finger down on the first one and my finger landed exactly on the word Fraser. Okay. And it landed on the Fraser River, which I believe is in Northwest America and Canada, sort of near the sort of Klondike, that sort of area. And I just sat there for about five minutes, just in, in astonishment that, at what had just happened. And I can't say, I mean, I know this is 25 years later. And that was the day you changed your name to Fraser.
Speaker C:I'm quite surprised you didn't end up putting your finger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker A:Well, quite, absolutely. But that's the point. There's all sorts of more, more probable things that, I mean, but let's assume that my memory is correct on this. And I'm, you know, I do doubt it now, but this really did happen. I'd be interested to know
Speaker B:the probability of that happening. Well, let's assume it's, let's say it's one in a million. And the point is, how many things do you do each day? Probably a thousand things. And, you know, so that means there's sort of 300,000 things you do every year. So one every three years, on average, a one in a million chance will happen to you. It's really boring to think of it that way. But, but yeah, I think there's one bit of practical advice. I think when we do encounter an unexplained mystery is there are, we can, there are probably three things we need to think about. So we, first of all, yeah, could be an unknown explanation. So it could be this requires an explanation. And we just haven't thought of it yet. But there's also, you know, could be a coincidence. So if you, for example, the face on Mars or something, you know, the face on Mars famous looks exactly like a face, just a coincidence. You know, we're almost certain of that now. Yeah, some would say, unfortunately, but the thing is that we need to always ask, well, actually, is this just a coincidence? In your case, was it just a coincidence? Or was the Fraser River calling to you? And finally, of course, you know, that maybe the data are wrong. So in this case, that would be or maybe you remembered it wrong. You know, a great unexplained mystery where the data are wrong is the mystery of the crystal skulls, which, you know, no one could work out how they'd been produced by, you know, the Aztecs with such a high degree of quality and so on. It turns out they were all made in the Victorian era. And you know, not in fact, ancient or mysterious at all. So yeah. So, you know, when it looks unexplained, at least first of all, just make sure it's not a coincidence or that you've got your data wrong first. Makes perfect sense.
Speaker A:Apart from the fact you've forgotten number four, magic. Because magic. Yeah. Wizard did it. Just because magic. Yeah. Just because magic. Okay, we'll wrap up there. Chaps, thank you very much. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast with myself, Reza McGruer, with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Thank you as always for listening. Until next week. Bye bye.
